AHHHH!! dang Arthurian Legend Project! taking up so much time, no time left to study for stats test tom =/

...though it is cool to be able to make Magic cards for marks... =)

will probably upload all the card images somewhere once we (me and Duy) are done

Passion of Christ = was a really good movie, in my opinion. It was very realistic in showing the suffering that Jesus went through. That sums up my view of the movie for now. =)

Arthurian Legend Midterm: went ok. There was a good Culhwch and Olwen question, but the Tristan questions weren't that good, the one I did had to deal with courtly love...didn't really study much of that...

:: accountability check = passed! hehe ::

awww...I wish I'd have thought of saying that...

Whoa!...Arthurian Legend midterm tomolo at 2:30...gotta read more about 2 of the major stories so that I'll at least know enough to be able to write the exam haha. Which I should've been doing much of yesterday...oh well. I think I'll be reading more about Tristan and Isolde, and also Culhwch and Olwen...heh, if anyone knows where I could find good information about Arthurian stuff, I'd be most grateful if you could tell me...though I doubt anyone does. =/

Scrapped Princess is a cool anime.

Mars apparently used to have a lot of water.

ahhh...what an amazing weekend...kinda hehe

Tournament Results:

VSA Poker Tournament: I was the 14th person to be knocked out - last person before the second round began =(. I was playing super conservatively until one game when I decided to go all in. Oh wells, I didn't really expect to win anyways. For more details on the event, and lessons on the perils of going all in, you can visit Bao's blog.

UW SciFi Club's Darksteel Sealed Tournament: On the otherhand, I thought I had an ok chance of actually winning something here - in the end, I only managed to win comments from ppl telling me that I did good considering it was my first sealed deck tourney ever, and also first time playing with Mirrodin block. I had 3 match wins, and 2 losses...I could've easily been 4 and 1, but I kept forgettting to do stuff during one game, against this Chinese guy name Nick Cheng. And I might have possibly been able to win my first round if I had shuffled better and not been mana screwed...there were so many tie-breakers needed at the end of the day that the tournament organizer had to check the opponent's win percentage for each player to decide who gets the prize. I'm not really complaining much though, it was still a really fun day, and I hope to be back next time, which I'm guessing might be a Control-Control-Control sealed event =)

well...that's all I'm going to write for now, I'm pretty sure a lot of the ppl who read this don't understand Magic, and I wouldn't want to bore everyone by explaining how to play poker here. The reason I'm updating at this hour is because I couldn't really sleep and woke up at like 5:45 am. =/

:: accountability check [Saturday] = passed [Sunday] = started to slip somewhat, I guess maybe 'cause of such a busy weekend and not having time to do much else...hopefully will be back on track today. ::

Schedule for Yesterday

Just going to post a record of what I did Friday, so i dun forget haha. I had a really eventful day, but can't really go into all the details about it otherwise this would end up being a super super long post.

-tanked calculus to study for pmath 330 midterm, and I actually did use that time to study, btw

-went to pmath midterm feeling nervous and expecting to do really badly, but it was like super easy (well, it would've been had we been a bit better prepared) but anyways, I think I got at least better than my calc midterm =p

-still on a rush of adrenaline after the exam, went to grab newest mathNews with the Waterloo Bros, and then tried to decide where to go eat

-remembered that Ambrose was coming over for lunch, so went back home and had fun with SSBM.

-Ambrose arrives, eat lunch at Phat Cat

-go down to basement to Melee some more, feel like I'm getting better than I used to be, but I still suck...oh well

-at 3:30, went to SLC to roleplay as Dr. Newheart, d20 game this time was mostly all roleplaying and racing and no fighting, but was still really fun

-whole d20 group plus Ambrose minus Andy dinner at Taj Palace, in the end, only me, brose, and baomon deicde to go to Lifesong, we end up making it just before the show starts

-Lifesong was alright...the play was cool, had more actual evangelistic stuff going on than last year though. meh, and the speaker there was Tony Costa =)...I kinda forgot who he was, but I know he spoke at WAY a few times back when I was there, and he was a good speaker. So seeing him there was kinda "from where?!"

-after Lifesong, most of my CCF friends go out to eat and play hockey and etc, Ambrose goes with them, Bao leaves, I stay back to try and talk to ppl, but not really successful, so I go home

-get home and practiced 2 hours of Texas hold'em poker with Bao and Duy, in preparation for the VSA poker tournament today at night...hope it goes well...

-tried to talk to other ppl, but no one was online except for like one person, but that was still cool

-Ambrose comes back at like midnight from eating with ppl, didn't want to go play hockey. we play a bit of original smash, I leave the basement early 'cause I'm not as good in that game and etc.

:: accountability check = passed! yay ::

so thus were the events of my day. At first, I didn't think it was as 'boring' as my auntie's day...haha, but now that I think about it, the way I described it probably made it seem that way. The rest of the week still promises to be very eventful, however, I just hope I dun get too tired for the Darksteel event tom. Anyways, gtg to Mel's soon, and then later get a ride to poker from Mel...haha...

Argh....PMATH 330 midterm tomolo morning at 10:20....so screwed...*sigh*

Dang old profs, can't write proper notes and says that the website is updated when it isn't. And doesn't even give the right assignment solutions...blah

A day of learning, though not in school.

Wow, I never knew how much info on limited and even sealed Magic you can find on Wizard's website alone. But I did know how easily I can become distracted while reading stuff like that, it was like I was studying for the Darksteel event more than my midterm on fri for a while tonight. =/ Oh wells...guess I'll just have to make up for it tomolo...good luck to everyone else who has midterms left! (Like you, Vanessa..heh, and your 'counterpart' over at my church). Also had a good talk today, in which I found out that I'd been a bit too overzealous in trying to talk to ppl over the net...it's alright, I needed to cut down anyways. And also, we forgive and forget, right? 'cause He forgave us.

Lastly, even though I'm really bad at giving encouragement to ppl, and wish I could be better at helping my friends, I'm going to post this quote up that I found kinda interesting. Read into what you want...though I think its meaning should be pretty self-explanatory:

"Spring follows winter. -Elvish expression meaning 'all things pass'"
~flavour text from Weatherlight's and Sixth Edition's Nature's Resurgence

Woodlands is now your friend!

Midterm on Friday, and a lot of weekend activities planned, so I guess I'll only do a short update of some "interesting" stuff that happened to me recently. (Well, as interesting as things over here can get, anyways =p)

Recently, I got another friend request form someone on Friendster, I thought that was kinda weird, I figured that it had basically died out among ppl that I knew. It's pretty much like AsianAvenue, except this time non-Asians won't feel so weird joining, and you can't customize your page as much. I joined it a few months ago, added a bunch of friends to my list, and then kinda forgot about it. It's got some humourous stuff you can do, like suggest a match for your friend and someone else...and how you can write "testimonials" about your friends, and that you can only add ppl if you're "sure that you're really friends with so-and-so." I also found it funny how ppl set up accounts for stuff like schools and even cities -> I was checking out some persons page a while ago, and he was friends with Mississauga lol. And I finally found the Woodlands page a while ago, and I added it, so thus Friendster sent me a silly email with the title that you see above. All in all, it's not really that useful of a program...as one of my friends put it, "You can make friends....or you can make FRIENDS!! =)"

Got 2nd stats lab back today...could've gotten perfect, but then we forgot to talk about bi-as for three sampling methods...so ended up with a 70%. Oh well...and I found out that my Arthurian Legend midterm has been pushed back one class...so yay! more time to study after this totally jam packed weekend.

Got my calculus 3 midterm back on Monday. Good news = I passed. Bad news = I passed with a 50 =\ Jason got a 70...he beasted both me and Duy. A funny thing was that this time, the marking TA took the time to respond to stupid EVERY comment I made on the front of the exam. Okay, starting from like elementary school, I've always liked writing responses/comments to things on tests and quizzes if I'm finished them ahead of time. And these are things that usually shouldn't be responded to, like the date of the test, of a misspelled word on the cover page. Or adding weird in stupid and ridiculous answers to some questions in a mutiple choice test. (What is the largest planet in the solar system? a) Jupiter b) Mars c) Mercury d) Pluto e) The Death Star ) So this time, on the cover page of the calc exam, I wrote a ton of stuff - there were instructions like "No Aids Allowed." and so I put beside it "not even water?" and then the TA wrote in red pen "air?" haha

Played more Smash again today, this time it was only Melee...some funny stuff happened, like Bao rebounding off a chimmney in Onett whiel in roll our and dying, or ppl getting KO'd by bombs from where!? I was stupid and kept getting my attacks Roy countered near the start.

whoa...I actually rambled on for a quite a bit...wonder if ppl would actually understand any of it lol. Anyways...back to studying.....=\

so...Jason is over...has been over since like 1 o'clock. Been playing massive smash...original and also trying out d2x leveling up mode in stamina. He's busy studying for his CS 134 midterm at the moment, and I'm trying to help him, although I should be studying for my own midterm haha. Oh wells...going out to eat again tonight. It was funny, I went to Sphigel's Classical Algebra class with him today and evaluated the colours for Mirrodin and Darksteel for the upcoming sealed deck event the whole time..hehe.
I guess I'd better get back to work now. Cya. =)

Played WAY too much smash today haha

By the order of Supreme Commander Wen Zhang....

Hmmm...I've got about 4 hours to kill until I'm supposed to go back to Waterloo. We planned to meet Duy at 8, which means we'll probably be leaving at around 8:30 at the earliest. I was going to take a nap, but since Wen suggested it, I figured I might as well blog some stuff and at least make some productive use of my time.

So church today was kinda weird; with like all of WAY and half of JOY gone on their respective winter retreats, and a bunch of doing Junior Worship, the kid's section was EMPTY when I walked in. There was like an average of one person per row. (each row is like 8 seats wide....and we have like 9-10 rows...?) It felt weird to be sitting there, considering how packed it usually is, and the speaker wasn't that interesting either.... I think around the time when he started speaking, two of the Junior Worship ppl came in and sat down in our section, and then a bit more ppl had come in by then...but it still mostly vacant. Also made an interesting discovery that two of my friends use the exam same kind and colour of notebook, and it'd be really really odd if they got switched one day and ended up reading each other's....Oh well...next week it'll be back to normal.

Unfortunately, Bao's Scrapped Princess cd's that he lent me wouldn't play properly on my old 233 MHz garbage comp - the sound works, but the images go at like 0.0001 frames a second. So yeah...I guess I'll have to watch it when I get home. From the one episode I saw last term and the anime event, it seems like a pretty good series though. (The main character has an interesting name, Pacifica) Although I've heard from Wen and Jason that's it's only ok...I still wanna watch it for myself and see.

On the Tuesday of reading week, Jia, Ambrose, and David Nijjar came over, and Jia and David slept over. That day, me and Duy and Jason had our calc 3 exam, which we had to study for, and it didn't go that well =(. But we still had a fun day, going to Mongolian Grill and eating tons of noodles and meat in the buffet, showing David around Waterloo (while he marveled at the campus, and kept calling UTM crap...haha) and then just hanging out and playing a bit of Smash afterwards and in between. From midnight until like 4 am, me and David stayed up talking about serious stuff, and I ended up speding about 3.5 hours telling him a long story about me and miscommunication hehe...that went well. Though what happened afterwards didn't go so well...*sigh* hopefully one day, this will all get resolved. But for now, let's not talk about it.

Thursday, I stayed up until 4 am helping to fix my sister's blog...hehe, it wasn't really a big deal, just took a long time to actually figure out what was going on, and then had to redo and copy a lot of code. But all in all, it was a good learning experience =). That day, however, combined with staying up just as late on Tues, made me super sleepy on Friday. It wouldn't have been a problem since there wasn't any fellowship due to the double retreats, but I had wanted to do something with the ppl who were left behind, but A) I didn't know who was left and B) the ppl who were left that I could contact, had already made other plans. Same thing happened on Saturday, when my friends were either gaming at the Waterloo Bro's or eating dinner with old high school friends, while I was stuck at home alone...haha. And then it turns out that Betty had wanted to have a Book Study Club meeting that night too, even though Andrew wasn't here. Should've checked my email sooner haha.

Thus ends my pretty eventful reading week - I mean, days. A lot of times I was really tired that it felt like a dream haha. Whoa...I think this is the longest entry I've written so far, and I still have to write about the highlights of our d20 games...hopefully Bao and Duy can remember some funny stuff. *Duy signs in* hmmm what a coincidence....oh wells, I guess I should stop talking now. Thanks for reading. And you are a ha gau, sit down.

Dang, reading week is over already?? *sigh* Oh well, at least I can look forward to the VSA Poker Night (where a PS2 is winnable) and the UW Sci Fi club's Darksteel Sealed Event. Those should be fun...and right after my PMATH exam too...but then there's Arthurian Legend...ack, haven't even started on that Magic exapansion project for that course yet....

Crappy old 233 MHz comp...so slow...thus haven't been updating much recently. I know I said I'd do a real update today though....=\ Dun worry though, will start to update again once I get back to 'loo...

awww...I finally get to come home for Reading Days, and now most of my friends are going off on Winter Retreat/ JOY Retreat. Oh well...perhaps I could use this time to catch up on PMATH 340...now if I could only remember where the course notes were....

hmmm....quick reminder to everyone reading this: if using blogger, save a copy of your template every once in a while...you never know what could happen....

"Duy writes an exam with calculus questions with a pencil."

Was just checking the news today, and I found something pretty humourous. It's been a while since I've seen something like this, so here it is:

Headline on cnn.com ~ "Grenade in car closes US border crossing."

This is what the story was really about:

(CNN) -- Canadian Border Patrol officials Monday found a grenade in the glove compartment of a car that was trying to enter Canada from the United States, Canadian authorities told CNN.

And this was the actual title of the article:

---

Canada stops car with grenade
'We don't take chances at the border'

---

[Canadian border guard] Oh no! A suspicious looking car is trying to cross our border. What do we do? Throw a grenade at it!!![/Canadian border guard]

thankful for some bit of comic relief before my exam =)
(for reference: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/02/16/border.grenade/index.html)

since that double post screwed things up, I've decided to make another short post before I do battle with calculus tomolo. First of all, to everyone who hasn't done this before, try it:

http://www.datacraft.co.jp/takagism/index_e.html

it's an interesting flash "mystery puzzle thinger" where you have to escape from a locked room. If you think Engrish is funny, you'll probably love the subtitles. (too bad Season doesn't read this..haha) Some parts of it are kinda annoying,and I did get stuck and couldn't solve it without help...but yeah, it's still fun.

and lastly, I guess I'll end with another quote...since I've gotten inspiration from Joel's blog, and various other ppl's as well. (he doesn't read this either, but oh well)

"Worship the ideal, not the idol." - Serra
~ flavour text from Urza's Saga Worship

anyone care to tell me what this quote is trying to say? 'cause I'm not sure at all what it means....

UW Reading Week is a gip, I demand a refund!

So...last night's 'studying' for the calculus midterm tom went pretty well, although Jason and Duy spent a lot of time playing/talking about D2x haha. We did manage to get a least a good hour of hardcore studying done at least though (ppl who know about D2 might get the unintentional pun in that line)

Anyways, going to go back to Jason's place to do more studying soon. So just wanted to say that I am still going to talk about all the funny stuff that happened during our last two dnd games...but cramming for calc 3 out prioritizes that heh. Argh...dang Waterloo and its stupid Reading Days....

(wishing I could be back at home)

"It's surprising how many messages God has in his outbox." -slasher

Hmmm...I should be studying right now, but I'm taking a short break to read a bit of the d20 Modern Rules Book, and I'm learning a lot of interesting stuff hehe. Hopefully I'll be able to remember and learn more stuff so next time our games can go faster and not have to end late again like yesterday (will post about highlights of that later).

and eww...I just discovered that Treat Injury is a class skill for the Dedicated Hero (me) and being a Doctor can also give me Treat Injury as a permanent class skill. I still need to choose one more class skill from the doctor set, but since I already have Treat Injury from being a Dedicated Hero, I can take that skill again for being a doctor and get +1 to all checks with it instead. Cool...doing a medical miracle keeps looking more and more plausible haha. So good...

Arts, Asians, and Adventures

just got to say a few things before I forget...

PMATH assignment = tanked (due to procrastination), and also missed both classes today in favour of 'studying' for Econ...which went really well, surpirsingly. I went to the exam room and just like last time, it was already jam packed even though it wasn't even time for it to start yet. So since I'm "late" I get handed an exam and a scantron card by this TA standing at the door. So I sit down, and I look around and see that most other ppl dun even have their exams yet....what the? Then when it's time to start, the teacher comes around with a stack of exams and starts passing them down each row, but of course since some ppl already had exams and some didn't...that was like a really inefficient way of doing it. Arts profs always have all these little policies and stuff that are annoying...but meh, maybe I'll talk about them later.

The exam was 20 multi choice questions, and we had 45 mins to do them. It was supposed to be harder than the first one, according to the prof...but I didn't really think so. Once again, some guy left like after 5 minutes, and I know that I had put just a bit more effort into studying, then I could've owned it. I ended up guessing on some stuff, but after the exam I checked my answers from the text book (since all the questions are basically taken straight from there anyways) and found out that I got most of those guesses right, so yay!

while walking back home, I saw a bunch of Asian ppl jay walk across the street in front of my house (Philip) and then force a bunch of cars to really slow down 'cause they were afraid of hitting them. But those ppl were walking like they owned the road, not even paying attention to the cars. Reminded me of something that happened yesterday after class: at the same intersection, me and Duy were waiting with this fob couple, who were both smoking and talking loudly in Cantonese. I was in front, so I saw a gap in the traffic coming up and dashed across the street with ample time to spare, while Duy didn't feel like risking it. The two fobs, however, started WALKING across right after me...and so as I get to the other side, I suddenly hear all this loud honking behind me...so I turn around and there are these two people strolling leisurely across the street, totally engaged in their convo and oblivious to everything else, even the cars that had to stop only a couple feet away from them.
Dang it...as I was talking with Jason later on last night, it's ppl like that that give 'fobs' and even other Asian ppl such a bad image, especially over here in UW. Especially ones that talk all through class in Chinese and make fun of ppl and the profs behind their backs, have cellphones with annoying ring tunes that always happen to ring in class, don't even try to learn any English, and generally don't show any respect to others. Blah...I know most fobs aren't like that, but I hate it when ppl treat me badly 'cause they think I am one of them, just because I look Chinese.

Thus ends my one and half rants of the day. No CCF tonight...'cause of winter retreat =( But that's ok, 'cause then I can make to our second DND session tonight without feeling guilty...hehe. And hopefully this time, Dr. Newheart won't die in one hit.